Another effing app

First came the fucking weather app which amused me no end in times of absolute and crippling boredom. Now comes something that takes that attitude in an even more fun direction.
WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I GO FOR DRINKS?
If it sounds fucking British that's because it is. Here's the nice write up.
`There’s a neat little web application that has been out for a while now, called simply “WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I GO FOR DRINKS?” (yes, all caps). Created by British creative consultancy coolography, the website gets right to the point. It is inspired by the similar What The Fuck Should I Make for Dinner? which gives users suggestions on recipes.
The location is random, and if you go back to the site, chances are a different location will come up. 
The first button, “My Location is Fucking Wrong,” lets you change the default starting location, to search a different area perhaps. The second button (the middle one), “No, That Place Looks Like Shit,” spins the wheel again and gives you the next random selection. The third button, “Actually, I’m Fucking Hungry” takes you to it’s twin-sister site, “Where the Fuck Should I Go To Eat?”
Or you can get there from here
http://www.wherethefuckshouldigotoeat.com

What appeals to me,beside the childish pleasure of the `f' word is that it re-inforces the fact that your smart phone is fucking way smarter than you and knows it. It makes your computer so fucking superior its an insight to the future when nano chips breed more nano chips and make themselves sentient.
It may not be quite what Arthur C Clarke envisioned for the future but I think it was exactly what Phillip K Dick imagined. And his stories are a lot cooler that Arthur's. In my fucking opinion.

Oh poop!

Today's post has a distinctively scatological theme.Bodily waste.And in the two examples I'm
floating here it's use is relevant. The anti-smoking film event above makes its point although I don't know if it's as hard-hitting and convincing as some of the emotionally wrenching tv work that's been running here in the New York area.Telling me that a component of dog shit is found in cigarettes obviously earns a `eeewww' from the audience but so would telling them that bat guano is an ingredient in mascara.Yes this poop and pee show creates a spectacle but I doubt if it changes habits. There's a tv spot running currently in which a woman is told by her doctor that she has lung cancer and the voice over chillingly says the only thing worse that getting this news is giving this news to your children.
At which we see the woman trying to pluck up the nerve to tell her kids that Mommy is going to die.

Here from Bangkok and actually looking more like a penis than a turd is another example of advertising indulging in coprophagy. This time it's an ad for people who are unwillingly anal-retentive and I guess it comes under the heading of `oh those crazy Bangkok creatives and their lax advertising standards authorities!' But having got me to the `eeewww' nose-wrinkling stage once again it does nothing to convince me to take the brand seriously. I'm sure it will win awards after all throwing shit at the wall and seeing if it sticks has been a time-honored practice in this wild and wacky ad world. I only hope the trophy is more tasteful.

You're ugly and fat go away!

Abercombie & Fitch. What genius lives within the walls of this company! What perfect ambassadorial spirit of the American dream! No ugly fat people wanted. Brilliant marketing.Are you taking note Mrs Obama? You can preach all you want about the values of vegetables and good nutrition to a young generation but nothing will get them off their lardasses like being denied entry to the hallowed halls of A&F. The white kids of rich suburbia now have a reason to abandon those thousand calorie Starbucks frappes and start working out.
Or you can consider them the worst kind of fashion fascists who deserve to have all their clothing distributed to the homeless who thanks to severe malnutrition can model their brand perfectly.

hold your nose

I love those Fabreze ads where blindfolded people are in a really stinky environment
filled with dead cats and rotting vegetables. It's the ultimate demo and it's entertaining to watch. High fives being slapped on both sides.
Now this past weekend I decided to make a curry not quite from scratch but almost
and I labored over the pot like a crazy alchemist . The results were amazing: It was a great  meal. My
fingers were bright yellow from the turmeric.My pans were destroyed. And somehow the smell of the curry seemed to be everywhere and it wouldn't go away.A day later the smell was still hanging around. Day 3 the same. Day 5-same again.  Day 6 I bucked and went out to buy a bottle of the magic Febreze. This stuff can fend off monster stench.I know because I have seen what it can do in commercial land.So bottle upon bottle of the stuff is discharged into the atmosphere only to have negligible effects.More bottles and plug in fresheners are deployed. And still the curry cloud hovers above the house.In the end 5 bottles and 2 plug-ins later I can still smell it.
I'm waiting now to see the disclaimer saying we apologize for not being able to deal with curry smells.
I'm hoping that by the time that happens the smell itself will have disappeared.

Algorithm and Blues

A long time ago in a galaxy far away when I was a writer working on Coca-Cola the talent agency CAA or rather Michael Ovitz the über-agent to the stars at CAA decided that Hollywoodland could do a better job of advertising than Madison Avenue. He figured that having sway with the cream of directors cinematographers scriptwriters and actors gave him an advantage. His pitch was enticing. `Ladies and Gentlemen , imagine if you will the vision of Francis Ford Coppola, the humor of Rob Reiner,the energy of Richard Donner….yadda yada yada.’ Well I can’t remember if Coppola actually got to shoot one since he had previously shot a spot for General Motors which that client considered un-airable and the Coke folks were gun-shy after seeing why. I do remember that the most lasting thing to come out of this exercise was the animated Polar Bears. A wise man (as opposed to wise guy) at McCann called Bruce Nelson said to me at the time how crazy it was for the  Coke client to fall for  CAA’s story since if an ad agency had the same success rate as the movie biz we’d all be out of business in a month. The movie hit and miss ratio was and still is pretty awful. Which is why it was interesting to read in the New York Times today about Vinny Bruzzese (now that sounds like a wise guy) chief executive of Worldwide Motion Picture Group who is bringing analytics to evaluate movie scripts and better predict if they will be boffo or bombs. He and his team of data demons compare story structure and genre of a script and use a database of focus group results for similar movies and also surveys 1500 potential moviegoers. He has already been hired to analyze over 100 scripts and his magic algorithms were apparently instrumental in  tweaking movies such as `Oz the Great and Powerful’. I’m sure that feelings are mixed. Scriptwriters who get thumbs up from Vinny will say it’s great and those who get the thumbs down will be unhappy. I agree with those who are concerned that it will bring a greater degree of conformity to an industry with a microscopic comfort zone. I think it would be a great exercise to try a little blind testing and provide him with scripts from original and critically acclaimed movies and see how they fare under the scrutiny of Vinny’s successo-meter. I can also see his analytics being incorporated into script writing software so that just as you type in `Open in a bowling alley’ a box will pop up to remind you that the success rate of movies with bowling scenes is  2% and can you change it from bowling alley to laundromat because the success rate there is 78%. That would be both fun and useful. Ahh but then in the very same issue of  The New York Times I saw the perfect opportunity for Vinny to make it magillah big. The article was about how media giants like Condé Nast were creating their own on-line content and looking for advertisers to buy into them in the same way they buy into broadcast programming. One such piece of `content’ was a series in which Vogue person Hamish Bowles is seen shopping his way around the world. Yahoo has created an on-line series with actor John Stamos interviewing other `celebrities’ about where when and how they lost their virginity. This is the perfect place to bring in Vinny and testing. There is such a rush now to throw` content’ on the internet thinking that there’s an audience just sitting around waiting for it and willing to drop the daily dose of Word with Friends or Angry Birds for 20 minutes of Hamish trying to decide between floral and stripes. Content is in danger of just being content pollution. Which is something I'm very discontent about. It’s stuff I don’t want to see getting in the way of stuff I want to get to. If agencies and now studios are pre-testing their work doesn’t it make sense for media companies to do the same. Vinny’s analyzer offers the perfect way to measure if any this `content’ has any value. At the least it could spare us from seeing Hamish buying bowling shoes.